Middlesbrough's fans voted with their feet but Gordon Strachan was grateful for Kris Boyd's left boot after he earned a first Championship win of the season.

A paltry 14,633 were there to witness Boyd's maiden strike in English football, comfortably the lowest-ever crowd for a League game in the Riverside's 15-year history.

High fives: Boyd (far left) wins the adoration of Riverside after scoring

It is a statistic which will disturb
the club's hierarchy after hefty investment. It beat the previous low,
recorded against Swansea last season, by more than 2,000.

Boyd carved out a stellar reputation
as a finisher during four seasons with Rangers and showed that side of
his game has still not deserted him with his move to Teesside,
fashioning the only clear-cut opportunity of the contest himself to get
Boro's campaign up and running.

Good point: Speed

Former Old Firm striking rival Scott
McDonald's flick-on was not dealt with by Sheffield United's Chris
Morgan, who paid dearly for ending up on the wrong side of the ball as
Boyd nodded it into the area and stroked it across Steve Simonsen from
15 yards.

SPEED HAS SLOW START

Gary Speed remained upbeat after getting his managerial career off to a losing start.

Sheffield United are bottom of the table with just one point after Middlesbrough manager Gordon Strachan got one over his former Leeds team-mate.

Speed said: 'That (the table) doesn't worry me at the moment because one thing I have got is a group of players who are willing to work hard.'

Having bettered Henrik Larsson's
Scottish Premier League's all-time scoring record with 164 goals, Boyd,
27, opted for the challenge of restoring Boro to the top-flight.

Indeed, his capture was the coup de
grace in a summer spending spree which cost in excess of £6million in
transfer fees, millions more in wages, and cast Boro as pre-season
Championship title favourites.

Such financial freedom is not
available to genuine football fans in the current climate, however, and
boss Strachan believes it is a lack of funds rather than faith in his
team that contributed to the poor turnout for the televised lunchtime
kick-off.

'There are big gaps everywhere,' he
said. 'At Coventry there were 13,000 yesterday, I look at Wigan and
there is hardly anybody there and at a place like ours when
unemployment is huge you are not going to get people turn up to a game
that's on telly.

'Only footballers seem to have money
- it is a business that seems to have completely ignored recession in
terms of wages and all the rest of it.'

Strachan opted for greater width to his team's play on the way to only a fourth win in 15 League matches.

There were full debuts for Estonia winger Tarmo Kink and Andrew Halliday, 18, a summer buy from Livingston, on the flanks.

The latter was in tandem with
Matthew Kilgallon, who only left United in January, on the left. Indeed
it was Kink who awakened the sparselyscattered stands when he unleashed
a shot from 30 yards which narrowly cleared the crossbar.

Appreciative gulps morphed to boos a
dozen minutes later, however, at the half-time whistle. They would have
grown louder had Ched Evans shown the same composure as Boyd when
presented with the first half's single opening but goalkeeper Jason
Steele's legs kept out his shot.